When there's just so much to be made from doing I'm A Lumberjack or Every Sperm Is Sacred, you really can't say no. However, we all know how far this great movie and opera director has evolved since the Python days. And yet, and yet. There will presumably be other, different walk-ons later in the run. But maybe period flavour is part of the point. John Cleese isn't quite match fit. Published: 1 Jul 2014 Monty Python Live (mostly) at the O2 – in pictures. Stephen Fry made a self-conscious live cameo. Monty Python Live (Mostly) isn't bad: it gives the crowd exactly what they want but relies pretty heavily on the fan love and makes a hefty withdrawal from the reputation bank. The great "ex-parrot" aria that concludes the famous sketch always used to be delivered by him at a screaming pitch of velocity and rage that brought the house down. Stephen Fry made a self-conscious live cameo. The reunion of the Monty Python team on stage for the first time in … There was a real flash of fire and comedy. It was a golden-oldie recapitulation of their greatest hits, padded out with song'n'dance ensemble numbers from a chorus young enough to be the Pythons' grandchildren. Not a great deal of effort has gone into updating the script. The sketches are old – of course they are, and you'd have to have a heart of stone not to enjoy hearing them again just a bit, though the campy jokes about men with silly effeminate voices and ladies' underwear have dated. Most popular. As a fan, I have to admit to a twinge of awe and even an uncool microsecond of lachrymose emotion at seeing them together again – looking old, as old as the Four Yorkshiremen were supposed to be when they originally did the sketch as young men. His delivery has slowed up and I sensed that he sometimes can't quite muster the energy. Film Books If Abba reformed, nobody would expect them to avoid Dancing Queen in favour of new compositions and songs that didn't pass muster at the time. For this show, it is much slower and flatter. Directed by Eric Idle, Aubrey Powell. More more on this story. Sometimes we saw the old Cleese. A string of O2 shows selling out in seconds? Photograph: Dave J Hogan/Getty Images. But it sends the faithful away happy. Monty Python Live (Mostly) (also billed as Monty Python Live (Mostly): One Down, Five to Go ) was a stage show by the Monty Python comedy group in The O2 in London in July 2014. In pictures: all the Python action from the o2, • Share your own Monty Python silly walks. The Pythons weren't miming – although there was a Spanish Inquisition level of unexpectedness in their liberal use of videos projected onto huge screens showing some of their greatest TV sketches, just to cover the scene changes. Monty Python Live (mostly) at the O2 – in pictures. And in fact the whole concept of the Python team doing new material is almost meaningless to fans and non-fans alike. Gallery. Just resting? Perhaps only a new West End live production of Fawlty Towers with the original cast could be more sensational. But then: why do that when we can see the movies, which are still (mostly) as fresh as a daisy? Jones and Idle and Palin actually look pretty sprightly, or at least no less sprightly than these gawky Englishmen have looked for the past few decades dressing up in silly clothes. It was their first live performance together in 16 years, the second without member Graham Chapman (who died in 1989) and the last with Terry Jones before his death in 2020. It was a golden-oldie recapitulation of their greatest hits, padded out with song'n'dance ensemble numbers from a chorus young enough to be the Pythons' grandchildren. Palin and Cleese attempt to breathe life into the parrot sketch at the 02. This show is reputedly for John Cleese's alimony bill but in truth the whole surviving crew – Cleese, Eric Idle, Michael Palin, Terry Gilliam and Terry Jones – are submitting to the awesome power of market forces. Idle actually had a bit of a Broadway show-stopping moment singing the Galaxy Song from The Meaning Of Life, surrounded by colossal projections of the universe, a number which was followed by a video contribution from Stephen Hawking, emphatically endorsing the Pythonesque view of the cosmos. omedy's greatest supergroup, in fact its only supergroup, gathered at London's O2 Arena like the Gratefully Not Dead, undertaking their staggeringly lucrative reunion show in the same cheerfully cynical spirit as their Contractual Obligation Album in 1980. His acting was never the point (the animation is still brilliant and these huge projections of his creations are almost a kind of retrospective for his great TV work). Planned as a single performance for 1 July, it was expanded to 10 shows due to the high demand for tickets. There will presumably be other, different walk-ons later in the run. During the argument sketch, his gimlet-stare assumed the fanatical intensity of yore, the robotic rapping of meaningless contradiction. It is in fact less satisfying than Spamalot - the stage musical version of their movie Monty Python and the Holy Grail – and it is in some ways a shame that this show could not have drawn more on their classic movies, the films on which their prestige probably now rests. Everyone wants the Pythons to do the classic stuff and so they did. He's got more of a tummy than the rest of the crew, and he has a bit of permanent frog in the throat. With John Cleese, Terry Gilliam, Eric Idle, Terry Jones. It is always a pleasure to see Terry Gilliam's mini-masterpieces of animation on a giant scale and there is even arguably a new level of surreality to this massive spectacle, a old-fashioned revue blown up to stadium level, a rickety geriatric gang being greeted with mass ecstasy. These sketches come from a time when some men really did go to work wearing bowler hats. Back in the days of the Hollywood Bowl – or indeed the 1974 Drury Lane show which first revealed the singalong popularity of the parrot sketch – they couldn't have dreamed of this kind of cash avalanche for doing an old set. People under 50 may need to be told what Timothy White's is or who Bertram Mills is, and they may be baffled at the idea of paying for a five-minute argument with a one-pound note. Terry Gilliam looked as if he was taking part in exactly the same spirit of baffled incompetence as in the old days. Comedy's greatest supergroup, in fact its only supergroup, gathered at London's O2 Arena like the Gratefully Not Dead, undertaking their staggeringly lucrative reunion show in the same cheerfully cynical spirit as their Contractual Obligation Album in 1980. This live show won't make any converts.